Whatever may be the difference of men’s opinions concerning
the measure of Mr Shelley’s poetical power, there
is one point in regard to which all must be agreed, and that is his Audacity. In the old days
of the exulting genius of Greece, Æschylus dared two
things which astonished all men, and which still astonish them—to exalt contemporary men
into the personages of majestic tragedies—and to call down and embody into tragedy,
without degradation, the elemental spirits of nature and the deeper essences of Divinity. We
scarcely know whether to consider the Persians or the Prometheus
Bound as the most extraordinary display of what has always been esteemed the most
audacious spirit that ever expressed its workings in poetry. But what shall we say of the young
English poet who has now attempted, not only a flight as high as the highest of
Æschylus, but the very flight of that father of tragedy—who
has dared once more to dramatise Prometheus—and, most
wonderful of all, to dramatise the deliverance of Prometheus—which is known to have formed the subject of a lost tragedy of
Æschylus no ways inferior in mystic elevation to that of the
Δισμωτης.

Although a fragment of that perished master-piece be still extant in the Latin
version of Attius—it is quite impossible to
conjecture what were the personages introduced in the tragedy of Æschylus, or by what train of passions and events he was able to sustain
himself on the height of that awful scene with which his surviving Prometheus terminates. It is impossible, however, after
reading what is left of that famous trilogy,* to suspect that the Greek poet symbolized any
thing whatever by the person of Prometheus, except the
native strength of human intellect itself-—its strength of endurance above all
others—its sublime power of patience. Strength and Force are the two agents who appear on this darkened theatre to bind
the too benevolent Titan—Wit and Treachery,
under the forms of Mercury and Oceanus, endeavour to prevail upon him to make himself free by giving up his
dreadful secret;—but Strength and Force,
and Wit and Treason, are all alike powerless to
overcome the resolution of that suffering divinity, or to win from him any acknowledgment of
the new tyrant of the skies. Such was this simple and sublime allegory in the hands of
Æschylus. As to what had been the original purpose of the framers
of the allegory, that is a very different question, and would carry us back into the most
hidden places of the history of mythology. No one, however, who compares the

* There was another and an earlier play of Æschylus, Prometheus the Fire-Stealer,
which is commonly supposed to have made part of the series; but the best critics, we
think, are of opinion, that that was entirely a satirical piece.

680

Prometheus Unbound.

mythological systems of different races and countries, can fail to
observe the frequent occurrence of certain great leading Ideas and leading Symbolisations of
ideas too—which Christians are taught to contemplate with a knowledge that is the
knowledge of reverence. Such, among others, are unquestionably the ideas of an Incarnate
Divinity suffering on account of mankind—conferring benefits on mankind at the expense of
his own suffering;—the general idea of vicarious atonement itself—and the idea of
the dignity of suffering as an exertion of intellectual might—all of which may be found,
more or less obscurely shadowed forth, in the original Μνθος of Prometheus the Titan, the enemy of the successful rebel and usurper Jove. We might have also mentioned the idea of a deliverer, waited for patiently through ages of darkness, and at last
arriving in the person of the child of Io—but, in
truth, there is no pleasure, and would be little propriety, in seeking to explain all this at
greater length, considering, what we cannot consider without deepest pain, the very different
views which have been taken of the original allegory by Mr Percy
Bysshe Shelley.

It would be highly absurd to deny, that this gentleman has manifested very
extraordinary powers of language and imagination in his treatment of the allegory, however
grossly and miserably he may have tried to pervert its purpose and meaning. But of this more
anon. In the meantime, what can be more deserving of reprobation than the course which he is
allowing his intellect to take, and that too at the very time when he ought to be laying the
foundations of a lasting and honourable name. There is no occasion for going round about the
bush to hint what the poet himself has so unblushingly and sinfully blazoned forth in every
part of his production. With him, it is quite evident that the Jupiter whose downfall has been predicted by Prometheus, means nothing more than Religion in general, that is, every human
system of religious belief; and that, with the fall of this, he considers it perfectly
necessary (as indeed we also believe, though with far different feelings) that every system of
human government also should give way and perish. The patience of the contemplative spirit in
Prometheus is to be followed by the daring of the
active
Demagorgon, at whose touch all “old thrones”
are at once and for ever to be cast down into the dust. It appears too plainly, from the
luscious pictures with which his play terminates, that Mr
Shelly looks forward to an unusual relaxation of all moral rules— or
rather, indeed, to the extinction of all moral feelings, except that of a certain mysterious
indefinable kindliness, as the natural and necessary result of the overthrow of all civil
government and religious belief. It appears, still more wonderfully, that he contemplates this
state of things as the ideal summum bonum. In
short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy,
sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain of this
poem—which, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite,
must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, as abounding in poetical beauties
of the highest order—as presenting many specimens not easily to be surpassed, of the
moral sublime of eloquence—as overflowing wi th pathos, and most magnificent in
description. Where can be found a spectacle more worthy of sorrow than such a man performing
and glorying in the performance of such things? His evil ambition,—from all he has yet
written, but most of all, from what he has last and best written, his Prometheus,—appears to be no other, than that of
attaining the highest place among those poets,—enemies, not friends, of their
species,—who, as a great and virtuous poet has well said (putting evil consequence close
after evil cause).

“Profane the God-given strength, and mar the lofty
line.”

We should hold ourselves very ill employed, however, were we to enter at any
length into the reprehensible parts of this remarkable production. It is sufficient to shew,
that we have not been misrepresenting the purpose of the poet’s mind, when we mention,
that the whole tragedy ends with a mysterious sort of dance, and chorus of elemental spirits,
and other indefinable beings, and that the spirit of the hour, one
of the most singular of these choral personages, tells us:

I wandering went

Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind,

And first was disappointed not to see

Such mighty change as I had felt within

Prometheus Unbound.

681

Expressed in other things; but soon I looked,

And behold! thrones were kingless, and men walked

One with the other, even as spirits do, &c.

Again—

Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons; wherein,

And beside which, by wretched men were borne

Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes

Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,

Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,

The ghosts of a no more remembered fame,

Which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth

In triumph o’er the palaces and tombs

Of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round

Those imaged to the pride of kings and priests,

A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide

As is the world it wasted, and are now

But an astonishment; even so the tools

And emblems of its last captivity,

Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth,

Stand, not o’erthrown, but unregarded now.

And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man,

Which, under many a name and many a form

Strange, savage, ghastly, dark, and execrable,

Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world;

And which the nations, panic-stricken, served

With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love

Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless,

And slain among men’s unreclaiming tears,

Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate,

Frown, mouldering fast, o’er their abandoned shrines:

The painted veil, by those who were, called life,

Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread,

All men believed and hoped, is torn aside;

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man

Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king

Over himself.

Last of all, and to complete the picture :—

And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind

As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew

On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant

forms, From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;

Speaking the wisdom once they dared not think,

Looking emotions once they dared not feel,

And changed to all which once they dared not be,

Yet being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,

Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill shame,

The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,

Spoilt the sweet taste of the Nepenthe, Love!

It is delightful to turn from the audacious spleen and ill-veiled abomination of
such passages as these, to those parts of the production, in which it is possible to separate
the poet from the allegorist—where the modern is content to write in the spirit of the
ancient—and one might almost fancy that we had recovered some of the lost sublimities of
Æschylus. Such is the magnificent opening scene,
which represents a ravine of icy rocks in the Indian Caucasus—Prometheus bound to the precipice—Panthea and Ione seated at his feet. The
time is night; but, during the scene, morning slowly breaks upon the bleak and desolate majesty
of the region.

Or the following beautiful chorus, which has all the soft and tender
gracefulness of Euripides, and breathes, at the same time,
the very spirit of one of the grandest odes of Pindar.

semichorus i. of spirits.

The path thro’ which that lovely twain

Have past, by cedar, pine, and yew,

And each dark tree that ever grew,

Is curtained out from Heaven’s wide blue;

684

Prometheus Unbound.

Nor sun, not moon, nor wind nor rain,

Can pierce its interwoven bowers,

Nor aught, save where some cloud of dew,

Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze,

Between the trunks of the hoar trees.

Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers

Of the green laurel, blown anew;

And bends, and then fades silently.

One frail and fair anemone:

Or when some star of many a one

That climbs and wanders thro’ steep night,

Has found the cleft thro’ which alone

Beams fall from high those depths upon

Ere it is borne away, away,

By the swift Heavens that cannot stay,

It scatters drops of golden light,

Like lines of rain that ne’er unite:

And the gloom divine is all around;

And underneath is the mossy ground.

semichorus ii.

There the voluptuous nightingales,

Are awake thro’ all the broad noon-day.

When one with bliss or sadness fails,

And thro’ the windless ivy-boughs.

Sick with sweet love, droops dying away

On its mate’s music-panting bosom;

Another from the swinging blossom.

Watching to catch the languid close

Of the last strain, then lifts on high

The wings of the weak melody,

’Till some new strain of feeling bear

The song, and all the woods are mute;

When there is heard thro’ the dim air

The rush of wings, and rising there

Like many a lake-surrounding flute.

Sounds overflow the listener’s brain

So sweet, that joy is almost pain.

We could easily select from the Prometheus Unbound, many pages of as fine poetry as this; but we are sure our
readers will be better pleased with a few specimens of Mr
Shelly’s style, in his miscellaneous pieces, several of which are
comprised in the volume. The following is the commencement of a magnificent “vision of the sea.”

’Tis the terror of tempest. The rags of the sail

Are flickering in ribbons within the fierce gale:

From the stark night of vapours the dim rain is driven,

And when lightning is loosed, like a deluge from heaven,

She sees the black trunks of the waterspouts spin,

And bend, as it heaven was raining in,

Which they seem’d to sustain with their terrible mass

As if ocean had sank from beneath them: they pass

To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound,

And the waves and the thunders made silent around

Leave the wind to ha echo. The vessel, now toss’d

Through the low-trailing rack of the tempest, is lost

In the skirts of the thunder-cloud: now down the sweep

Of the wind-cloven wave to the chasm of the deep

It sinks, and the walls of the watery vale

Whose depths of dread calm are unmoved by the gale,

Dim mirrors of ruin hang gleaming about;

While the surf, like a chaos of stars, like s rout

Of death-flames, like whirlpools of fire flowing iron

With splendour and terror the black ship environ,

Or like sulphur-flakes hurl’d from a mine of pale fire

In fountains spout o’er it. In many a spire

The pyramid-billows with white points of brine

In the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine,

As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea.

The great ship seems splitting! it cracks as a tree,

While an earthquake is splintering its root, ere the blast

Of the whirlwind that stripped it of branches has past.

The intense thunder-balls which are raining from heaven

Have shatter’d its mast, and it stands black and riven.

The chinks suck destruction. The heavy dead hulk

On the living sea rolls an inanimate bulk,

Like a corpse on the day which is hung’ring to fold

Its corruption around it. Meanwhile, from the hold,

One deck is burst up from the waters below.

And it splits like the ice when the thaw-breezes blow

O’er the lakes of the desart! Who sit on the other?

Is that all the crew that lie burying each other.

Like the dead in a breach, round the foremast? Are those

Twin tygers, who burst, when the waters arose,

In the agony of terror, their chains in the bold;

(What now makes them tame, it what then made them bold;)

Who crouch, side by side, and have driven, like a crank,

The deep grip of their claws through the vibrating plank.

Are these all? Nine weeks the tall vessel had lain

On the windless expanse of the watery plain.

Where the death-darting sun cast no shadow at noon,

And there seem’d to be fire in the beams of the moon,

Prometheus Unbound.

685

Till a lead-colour’d fog gather’d up from the deep

Whose breath was quick pestilence; then, the cold sleep

Crept, like blight through the ears of a thick field of corn,

O’er the populous vessel. And even and morn.

With their hammock for coffins the seamen aghast

Like dead men the dead limbs of their comrades cast

Down the deep, which closed on them above and around.

And the sharks and the dog-fish their grave-clothes unbound.

And were glutted like Jews with this manna rain’d down

From God on their wilderness.

All are dead except a woman and a child; nothing can be more exquisite than
that picture.

At the helm sits a woman more fair

Than heaven, when, unbinding its star-braided hair,

It sinks with the sun on the earth and the sea.

She clasps a bright child on her upgather’d knee,

It laughs at the lightning, it mocks the mixed thunder

Of the air and the sea, with desire and with wonder

It is beckoning the tygers to rise and come near,

It would play with those eyes where the radiance of fear

Is outshining the meteors; its bosom beats high.

The heart-fire of pleasure has kindled its eye;

Whilst its mother’s is lustreless. “Smile not, my child,”

But sleep deeply and sweetly, and so be beguiled

Of the pang that awaits us, whatever that be.

So dreadful, since thou must divide it with me!

There is an “Ode to the
West-wind,” another “to
a Sky-lark,“ and several smaller pieces, all of them abounding in richest
melody of versification, and great tenderness of feeling. But the most affecting of all is
“The sensitive
plant,” which is the history of a beautiful garden, that after brightening and
blossoming under the eye of its lovely young mistress, shares in the calamity of her fate, and
dies because she is no more there to tend its beauties. It begins thus:

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,

And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,

And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,

Like the Spirit of Love felt every where;

And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast

Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss

In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,

Like a doe in the noon-tide with love’s sweet want,

As the companionless Sensitive Plant

The snow-drop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,

And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent

From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,

And narcissi, the fairest among them all,

Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess,

Till they die of their own dear loveliness;

And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,

Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,

That the li^ht of its tremulous bells is seen.

Through their pavilions of tender green;

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,

Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew

Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,

It was felt like an odour within the sense;

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,

Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,

Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air

The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,

As a Maniad, its moonlight-coloured cup,

Till the fiery star, which is its eye,

Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tube-rose,

The sweetest flower for scent that blows;

And all rare blossoms from every clime

Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

Then for the sad reverse—take the morning of the funeral of the young
lady:

* * * The Sensitive Plant

Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt,

And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,

And the sobs of the mourners deep and low;

The weary sound and the heavy breath,

And the silent motions of passing death,

And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,

Sent through the pores of the coffin plank;

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass

Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;

From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,

And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,

Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,

Which at first was lively as if in sleep,

Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap

To make men tremble who never weep.

686

Prometheus Unbound.

Swift summer into the autumn flowed,

And frost in the mist of the morning rode,

Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,

Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

The rose leaves, like flakes of crimsons now,

Paved the turf and the moss below.

The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,

Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants, of scent and hue

The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,

Leaf after leaf, day after day,

Were massed into the common clay.

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red,

And white with the whiteness of what is dead,

Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past;

Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.

And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,

Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,

Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem,

Which rotted into the earth with them.

The water-blooms under the rivulet

Fell from the stalks on which they were set;

And the eddies drove them here and there

As the winds did those of the upper air.

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks,

Were bent and tangled across the walks;

And the leafless net-work of parasite bowers

Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.

These are passages which we do not scruple to place upon a level with the very happiest
productions of the greatest contemporaries of Mr
Shelley.

We cannot conclude without saying a word or two in regard to an accusation
which we have lately seen brought against ourselves in some one of the London Magazines; we
forget which at this moment. We are pretty sure we know who the author of that most false
accusation is—of which more hereafter. He has the audacious insolence to say, that we
praise Mr Shelley, although we dislike his principles,
just because we know that he is not in a situation of life to be in any danger of suffering
pecuniary inconvenience from being run down by critics; and, vice versa,
abuse Hunt, Keats, and
Hazlitt, and so forth, because we know that they are
poor men; a fouler imputation could not be thrown on any writer than this creature has dared to
throw on us; nor a more utterly false one; we repeat the word again—than this is when
thrown upon us.

We have no personal acquaintance with any of these men, and no personal
feelings in regard to any one of them, good or bad. We never even saw any one of their faces.
As for Mr Keats, we are informed that he is in a very
bad state of health, and that his friends attribute a great deal of it to the pain he has
suffered from the critical castigation his Endymion drew down on him in this magazine. If it be so, we are most heartily sorry
for it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we suspected that young author, of being so
delicately nerved, we should have administered our reproof in a much more lenient shape and
style. The truth is, we from the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in Mr
Keats’ verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become a real
poet of England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of Cockneyism, and
forswear for ever the thin potations of Mr Leigh Hunt. We,
therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the flagrant affectations of those
early productions of his. In the last volume he has published, we find more beauties than in
the former, both of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we find abundance of the
same absurd affectations also, and superficial conceits, which first displeased us in his
writings;— and which we are again very sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted
in, utterly and entirely prevent Mr Keats from ever taking his place among
the pure and classical poets of his mother tongue. It is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity
of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own importance, even in the eyes of us, that have
always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a
contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of any thing like anger or personal
spleen. We should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin, independently of their coming
into our apartment, as we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people, other
than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors. Many of them, considered in any
other character than that of authors, are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very
worthy people in their

Prometheus Unbound.

687

own way. Mr Hunt is said to
be a very amiable man in his own sphere, and we believe him to be so willingly. Mr
Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no
doubt his manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But what has all
this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us,
whether these men sit among themselves, with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton
steaks, and drinking their porter at Highgate, Hampstead, or Lisson Green? What is there that
should prevent us, or any other person, that happens not to have been educated in the
University of Little Britain, from expressing a simple, undisguised, and impartial opinion,
concerning the merits or demerits of men that we never saw, nor thought of for one moment,
otherwise than as in their capacity of authors? What should hinder us from saying, since we
think so, that Mr Leigh Hunt is a clever wrongheaded man, whose vanities
have got inwoven so deeply into him, that he has no chance of ever writing one line of
classical English, or thinking one genuine English thought, either about poetry or politics?
What is the spell that must seal our lips, from uttering an opinion equally plain and
perspicuous concerning Mr John Keats, viz. that nature possibly meant him
to be a much better poet than Mr Leigh Hunt ever could have been, but
that, if he persists in imitating the faults of that writer, he must be contented to share his
fate, and be like him forgotten? Last of all, what should forbid us to announce our opinion,
that Mr Shelley, as a man of genius, is not merely
superior, either to Mr Hunt, or to Mr Keats, but
altogether out of their sphere, and totally incapable of ever being brought into the most
distant comparison with either of them. It is very possible, that Mr
Shelley himself might not be inclined to place himself so high above these men
as we do, but that is his affair, not ours. We are afraid that he shares, (at least with one of
them) in an abominable system of belief, concerning Man and the World, the sympathy arising out
of which common belief, may pro-bably sway more than it ought to do on both sides. But the
truth of the matter is this, and it is impossible to conceal it were we willing to do so, that
Mr Shelley is destined to leave a great name behind him, and that we,
as lovers of true genius, are most anxious that this name should ultimately be pure as well as
great.

As for the principles and purposes of Mr
Shelley’s poetry, since we must again recur to that dark part of the
subject, we think they are on the whole, more undisguisedly pernicious in this volume, than
even in his Revolt of Islam. There is an
Ode to Liberty at the end of the
volume, which contains passages of the most splendid beauty, but which, in point of meaning, is
just as wicked as any thing that ever reached the world under the name of Mr Hunt himself. It is not difficult to fill up the blank which has
been left by the prudent bookseller, in one of the stanzas beginning:

O that the free would stamp the impious name,

Of * * * * into the dust! Or write it there

So that this blot upon the page of fame,

Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air

Erases, &c., &c.

but the next speaks still more plainly,

“O that the Wise from their bright minds would kindle

Such lamps within the dome of this wide world,

That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle

Into the hell from which it first was hurled!”

This is exactly a versification of the foulest sentence that ever issued from
the lips of Voltaire. Let us hope that Percy Bysshe Shelley is not destined to leave behind him, like
that great genius, a name for ever detestable to the truly free and
the truly wise. He talks in his preface about Milton, as a
“Republican,” and a “bold inquirer into Morals and religion.” Could any
thing make us despise Mr Shelley’s understanding, it would be such
an instance of voluntary blindness as this! Let us hope, that ere long a lamp of genuine truth
may be kindled within his “bright mind;” and that he may walk in its light the path
of the true demigods of English genius, having, like them, learned to “fear God and
honour the king.”